A university president makes a case against cowardice

He states in the interview that Wesleyan has NIH grants. They are preparing to let scientists go if it comes to it.

Wesleyan does not have a medical center and according to the NIH’s public reporting, they have under $2 million in NIH grants, compared to $600 million for Columbia. (Edited from $400 million, which is the value cut.)

Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.

So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.

That makes a strong case for academic institutions not being substantially dependent on government research dollars.

No it doesn’t. The First amendment is supposed to prevent the government from conditionalizing access to government services based on the speech of the recipient. Private institutions are not subject to such restrictions. If we want to encourage academic freedom, we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal.

> we want to find this behavior by the government to be illegal

of course we do - but we're sadly discovering how easy it is for the government to target and coerce these universities, with nobody stepping up to stop them

So we want universities to get their funding from private sources that are expressly entitled to impose the same kind of conditions? Or do we want universities to spend more time and overhead on cobbling their funding together from a large number of intellectually and morally diverse sources? Where will these sources get their money without the power of taxation?

If you're going to resort to Constitutional arguments, you shouldn't gloss over the fact that the federal government is supposed to be one of enumerated powers, and there's no 'bribing universities to do what you want' federal power.

What do you think that 10% of budget is paying for that the university is spending on? It's more or less paying for the building and all that goes into it for the research that the NIH called for grant proposals to happen in. This is the entire idiocy about indirect benefits. Yes, paying for the building is not spending money directly on research. But you can't exactly do lab work without a lab building you know.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Article 1 gives congress very broad budgetary powers. Basically congress can spend money how they want, including bribing universities.

It's nice to be against something, but incomplete to uselessness if you are leaving out your alternative suggestion(s). They will always be dependent on someone.

If you were to go the most direct route, you might want to let the actual "customers", the students, pay for it all, delayed until they have a job of course?

A different version of student loans, it's the university itself that lets them study for free to collect later. I have no idea how that would turn out, I'm sure there would be so many different cases, impossible for me to tell what this would mean and look like.

The biggest problem I can see right away is that it's probably going to increase inequality between institutions. Ever more sorting of the rich and the poor into different places, with huge disparity of funding. So, probably a terrible idea unless the goal is dystopia.

Which leads me back to my question: What is your alternative? I think the government is better than pretty much all others. Private donors are quite problematic to rely on, and you only get the 1% to have even more power over education.

It's ironic that we're re-discovering this in 2025, it was pretty transparent in the late 1960s and early 70s, to students protesting their govt-funded universities' involvements in supporting the Vietnam War. The demands of students back then involved withdrawing from govt-funded grants and programs.

If you take money from an entity, you become an extension of that entity.

It depends on your understanding of Article 1 Section 8:

>"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

What does "general Welfare" mean in this context? Are those words just meaningless filler, or should they be interpreted to indicate that the spending must be in furtherance of another specifically enumerated power? I believe the latter (Madisonian take), but this is a contentious subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause#Gen...

I don't think the first amendment protects this. The first amendment protects against prosecution from speech. In this case, they are not being prosecuted, they are just being denied funding. Where are you getting that the "First amendment is supposed to prevent the government from conditionalizing access to government services based on the speech of the recipient." It does not state that at all